Internet home of Evan May, author of The King in Darkness

Head Up

So despite my repeated assurances that this is not going to become Evan’s Running Blog, in the interests of Having Something To Write this week – you know I really did have a kind of interesting train of thought while out for my run the other day.

Going through the difficult part of the run, (basically every run that I do has a difficult part) I had to do the usual thing of talking myself out of several bad behaviours that start to happen when I start to get tired. I have to remind myself not to put my head down – this compresses the lungs and partly closes the throat, so it makes breathing more difficult. I have to remind myself not to shorten my stride, which results in needing to make more steps to cover ground and therefore burns more energy than my normal form would. I have to remind myself to relax my shoulders, so that I’m not wasting energy by tensing the muscles there; same deal with unclenching my jaw.

I have long found it curious, and a little frustrating, that the body’s instincts (or, at least, my body’s instincts, although this seems to be common) are, in a moment of difficulty, to do things that are not only unhelpful, but actually counterproductive. It would seem (in my extraordinarily poor understanding of evolution) that it would make more sense if the natural tendency was to instinctively adopt behaviours that are more efficient, rather than less, as exertion increases, and therefore do better at what the body is currently trying to do. Instead, without thinking about it, my body switches to a bunch of things that only make what I’m trying to do more difficult to accomplish. The only conclusion I’ve ever reached when I think about this is that the instinctive part of my body has decided that the best thing to do would be to stop running, and so it’s ‘trying’ to do things that will make that happen.

However that may be, its frustrating to feel that I’m ‘naturally’ reaching for things that are making what I’m trying to do harder and working against my own interests (finishing my run as soon and as easily as possible) in the moment. It also occurred to me that running isn’t the only time this happens. I know it happens with writing, sometimes.

When a writing project is going well, I can’t get enough of it and am basically constantly looking for excuses to write a little more of it. When it stops going well, unfortunately my natural instinct is to leave it aside for a while, which is exactly the wrong thing to do because whatever it is will never get better, and never get finished, if I don’t work on it. I even do this with particular parts of a work; if there’s a scene or piece of dialogue that I can’t figure out how to make work, I will (as I think I’ve written before) skip over it (sometimes leaving myself a helpful note like FIX THIS LATER or THIS IS TERRIBLE) and write something else for a while, which certainly relieves the short-term frustation of not being able to make that particular bit work, but doesn’t fix the actual problem. The only way it gets fixed is to sit and try some different approaches and write some bloody stuff down and eventually figure out a way to come up with something that reads approximately ok.

Just as when I’m running, it seems inevitable that these things will happen, and what I mostly have to do is remind myself (again) not to follow my counterproductive, contrary-to-my-actual-interests instincts, and do the things that currently feel difficult, but will get me where I need to go in the end. Open that document. Go to that scene, erase my despairing little note, and jigger around with words until it does work. Much the same as getting my head up and lengthening my stride again, even though this feels like something I desperately don’t want to do, it’s the only thing that get what I want done, done.

It also occurs to me that there is perhaps a parallel to recent political events here, regarding the appeal of figures like Donald Trump, and Nigel Farage, where in times of difficulty we may find ourselves attracted to ‘solutions’ that are not actually in our best interests, and end up doing things that won’t actually improve the situation we’re in, and may make it worse, just as my bad running behaviours do. I know you probably don’t come here for politics, though, and so I think I’ll take this no further this morning.

I will also say that I read a fascinating article a long time ago (long enough that I can’t find it this morning to link it for you) that suggested that human beings had once depended on running distances as a hunting strategy. The reasoning was that humans, without tools and weapons, were not strong enough to defeat many animals in a straight fight, nor swift enough to catch many in a short pursuit, and so what they would have had to do was make a long pursuit over a significant distance in order to bring their prey down more or less through sheer bloody exhaustion. So running, despite the behaviours I complain about above, is part of our instinctive core after all. I have no idea if that theory holds the slightest bit of water, but as a runner I kind of like it, and I also like the idea that, despite a tendency to sometimes do counterproductive and negative things in times of crisis, our better selves are still down there as well, even if we sometimes have to remind ourselves about them.

Head up. Have a great week.

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Apt 613 did a very kind review of The King in Darkness, for which I am very grateful. You can read it here.

The Limestone Genre Expo has released its final schedule, which I am even on! Check it out here, and its not too late to make plans to attend if you’d like a weekend of great reader-y writer-y fun in Kingston. I’m really looking forward to it and looking forward to meeting some new people there.